Ch. 11: The First Folio

"The First Folio" is the name commonly given to the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. The volume includes a Preface signed by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical verses by Ben Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait. The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the assent of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.

The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable. The title-page says that ALL the contents are published "according to the true original copies." If ONLY MS. copies are meant, this is untrue; in some cases the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by MSS. The Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote the Preface (and certainly it looks like his work), {207a} speaking in the name of the two actors who sign it. They say that Shakespeare's friends "have collected and published" the plays, have so published them "that whereas you were abus'd with divers stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed them: EVEN THOSE" (namely, the pieces previously ill-produced by pirates) "are now offered to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and ALL THE REST" (that is, all the plays which had not been piratically debased), "absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them." So obscure is the Preface that not ALL previously published separate plays are explicitly said to be stolen and deformed, but "DIVERS stolen copies" are denounced. Mr. Pollard makes the same point in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, p. 2 (1909).

Now, as a matter of fact, while some of the quarto editions of separate plays are very bad texts, others are so good that the Folio sometimes practically reprints them, with some tinkerings, from manuscripts. Some quartos, like that of Hamlet of 1604, are excellent, and how they came to be printed from good texts, and whether or not the texts were given to the press by Shakespeare's Company, or were sold, or stolen, is the question. Mr. Pollard argues, on grounds almost certain, that "we have strong prima facie evidence that the sale to publishers of plays afterwards duly entered on the Stationers' Registers was regulated by their lawful owners." {208a}

The Preface does not explicitly deny that some of the separately printed texts were good, but says that "divers" of them were stolen and deformed. My view of the meaning of the Preface is not generally held. Dr. H. H. Furness, in his preface to Much Ado about Nothing (p. vi), says, "We all know that these two friends of Shakespeare assert in their Preface to the Folio that they had used the Author's